Placcc Festival is back in town to bring some color and excitement to our shorter and grayer days and longer and colder nights. We wanted to see for ourselves what the hype was all about, so we went to see the Dutch-Hungarian post-modern theater company, Space’s performance entitled The Place Where We Belong. As a result, we found ourselves sitting on the glass bridge of a downtown hotel watching the building site that Kálvin tér has become and the people on the street talking about national identity and belonging.
The topic of the performance is a given as a Hungarian-Dutch couple (well, they are Space actually) who are thinking of moving to Hungary after having spent 20 years in Holland. To make their decision easier, the wife walks the streets with a hidden camera and mic posing the big question, should they stay or should they go – that is, to random strangers. In the meantime, the Dutch husband gives instructions to his wife. We watch everything live on screens inside the hotel and, when she’s in view, through the window. And, during the idler parts, we hear the wife reading her diary of the past twenty years of ‘exile’. She talks about the hardships of integration, about being a super-emigrant, about how Hungarian she felt though not uttering a single word in Hungarian for weeks, about the strong and weak points of the Dutch emigration laws, and about the apparent limitless freedom she felt.
It was surprising to see how many people were willing to share their thoughts on national identity at 8 p.m. on a Monday evening. The first interviewee was an expat of the opinion that if the husband is ‘normal’ (i.e., “he doesn’t drink and doesn’t beat her up”) she could go anywhere with him, but if he’s not ‘normal’, then she should just leave him. The second interviewee was a Hungarian pensioner; and we already knew there was trouble ahead. For the best part of twenty minutes he kept on rambling about the good old times before the big communist conspiracy. The third one criticised the girls who leave Hungary and have kids abroad. According to him, everyone should come back, or shouldn’t leave the country in the first place. The next one was a young girl who couldn’t express herself beyond a “don’t know” but her friend had a pretty fair argument concerning why the couple should move to Hungary and why living in this country is actually fun. Then their Italian friend arrived, and he made me feel that my home country was the best place in the world to live. Had the performance ended their, we would have had a fun evening, but it didn’t. The wife wanted to end the show on a more serious tone, so we got all the anger and misery of the 25 year old last interviewee, who made it clear that Hungary was the biggest loser ever. So, the question remained unanswered; but I think it’s up to us and our attitudes to life to feel where we belong. However much I sometimes wish I wasn’t, I know I’ll always be a Budapestian.